TRANSCENDENCE Is The NATURE Of HOMO

I preach and teach you transhumanism. Not just because that’s what we wish for, but because that’s what we are.Man, the genus Homo, is something which, not only shall be overcome, but whose very nature is to be continuously overcome, to be continuously transcended. We call that evolution, and that very smart force is strongest with us. (Says Quantum Physics, no less!)

What have our leaders done to overcome Homo? Nothing new. Instead they cling to the past, because that’s where the money is. And that’s the only thing they understand. Elected “representatives” forced on us the return of ever more grotesque plutocracy, now made global, an attempt to reduce us to a huge, worldwide chimpanzee society, with alpha males doing whatever they want, even murder, while brandishing nukes to impress us. As the ever more acidic sea rises, cannibals brandish nukes, overcoming man has turned from choice, to necessity. (Yes, that’s also an allusion to sustained violence against females, something weakening considerably our species’ mental capability, our core.)

Living beings on Earth have created something beyond what they themselves evolved into. This is what life has done for billions of years, even changing the atmosphere of the planet from methane to its antagonist, oxygen.

And do you want to be the chrysalis left by this great metamorphosis, going back to the beasts, as Nazis, Khmer Rouges, Jihadists, and worst of all, global plutocrats tried, and persist… Rather than to be human in full, and overcome man?

What is ape to man? A laughingstock or painful embarrassment. A reminder of what we truly are. And yesterday’s humanism shall only be that, a painful embarrassment, to the sort of transhumanism we need. Ape should be a lesson of what to avoid, in more ways than one. Despising yesterday’s humanism long has been the way to further humanism. Despising yesterday’s ways has long been the essence of sustainable civilization. Watch the Romans heap contempt on Celtic and Punic civilizations, for practicing human sacrifices (of prisoners for the former, their own children for the latter). That’s how wars are won, and empires built.

A laughingstock or painful embarrassment, this is what representative democracy, truly a reprehensible oligarchy of the lowest passions, has become. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Thus you aspire to be led by worms obsessed by “power”. And, even more embarrassingly, you deny it.

Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape… Only in man, the old-fashioned way, is violence against one’s own species, the fundamental religion. Even chimpanzees don’t go that far. Yet, only then, by massacring each other, could Homo evolve into us. Transcending our species could only be achieved in the bloodiest way.

The transcendence of blossoming intelligence is the meaning of the Earth. Let your will say: the transcendence of intelligence shall be the meaning of the Earth… Man is a rope, tied between beast and spiritual transcendence —a rope over an abyss … what is the greatest in Homo is being a bridge to somewhere hoped for, and not an end to the mud we come from.

Aristotle scoffed that we needed slaves, because we didn’t have machines. Thus Aristotle tied technology to ethics. The myth Athenian philosophers, in the greatest Greek age, imposed, all too brutally, was the “Open Society”, and total democracy. Western Europe has been more subtle, and much more rich in myths. The fundamental myth of the west is not Christianism, as Nietzsche himself pointed out. Nor is it just the “blonde beast”, the no-holds-barred aristocracy, as Nietzsche claimed. No, the fundamental myth of the West is the secular, Republican law, up to 25 centuries old. But this is exactly what global plutocracy presently violates (complete with its Jihadist attack dogs).

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Notes on the preceding: “Transhumanism” is fashionable in the Silicon Valley. The preceding gives it some scientifico-poetic metaphysical backup.

The first loud transhumanist was Nietzsche, something rather ironical. My own contribution above is a modification of one of Nietzsche’s most famous passages. Below is Nietzsche’s original from Also Spracht Zarathustra. There are significant differences between my version and Nietzsche’s. First the notion of Superman of Nietzsche (Ubermensch) is vague. It seems to be mostly a wished-for change of mentality, in Nietzsche’s parlance, sometimes, although at other times, he refers explicitly to biological evolution (worm, ape, etc.)

I refer explicitly to evolution. We have become masters of evolution, ever since we evolved goats, and saw the devil in them. Nietzsche professed to detest Darwin, as he did most “Englishmen”, for their lack of humor, a dearth of laughter, among other things, he said. In truth, strict Darwinism, the selection of the fittest, established by rolling the dice, robbed the universe of meaning. (And makes little scientific sense, when one looks at numbers with an open mind!)

Nietzsche could be very Lamarckian: “Over immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and helped to preserve the species: those who hit upon or inherited these had better luck in their struggle for themselves and their progeny. Such erroneous articles of faith, which were continually inherited, until they became almost part of the basic endowment of the species.” [Gay Science, Origins of Knowledge, # 110.]

I am more Nietzschean than Nietzsche, as I believe that what works is true. Truth does not need to be corrected, I embrace it, be it only to smother it to death. If a species is tried and true about some ways, how could it be in error?

More generally, Nietzsche’s metaphysics was borderline self-contradictory (Nietzsche’s “superman” in the end, is supposed to use his super mental powers to embraces “amor fati”, the love of one’s fate, something a mussel already does to perfection! Why is the superman indispensable to achieve the status of walrus’ food?)

My metaphysics is simpler: I believe understanding should be privileged, and that means love of, and for, those who generate and embrace it.

From my point of view, Homo evolved a succession of biological supermen (with the possible degeneracy from Homo Neanderthalis to a significantly inferior Homo Sapiens hybridized a bit with Neanderthal: Neanderthal genes were probably overcrowded and displaced for purely mathematical reasons, as I discovered, and some academic scientists recently confirmed by running computer models demonstrating my acumen without acknowledging it, as those in the rat race are wont to do).

Technology, which hindered our recent biological evolution, can now accelerate it enormously (thanks to gene editing, and various implementable devices).

So we can deliberately evolve really super supermen, guided by our super ethics and super smarts.

But there is even more tantalizing: Quantum Computing will bring, I boldly prophesize, Quantum Consciousness, Quantum Sentiensizing (Self Conscious Quantum Computing). Creating Artificial Consciousness, thanks to our mastery of Quantum Physics, will erase the frontier between man and machine.

Transcending the human species will then leave even supermen behind…

***

Before exposing Nietzsche’s famous discourse on the overman/superman, let me insist thatNietzsche’s superman has nothing to do with the Nazi supermen, quite the opposite. Indeed, Nietzsche hated the Prussianized Germany he saw created under his aghast eyes. Throughout his works, Nietzsche made a formidable campaign against Germany, the German state unified under Prussian hegemony at Versailles (France!) in 1871, complete with a thought system dominated by military superiority and racism (verily, trojan Horses for plutocracy). Prussia constitutionally hated, exploited and discriminated against Poles and Jews, whom Nietzsche made a show to judge to be vastly superior to Germans. The thinker whom they claimed, inspired their ideas, actually explicitly hated most of what the Nazis stood for! One can’t be more misinterpreted than being taken as an icon by a system of thought when one thoroughly contradicted it.

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Nietzsche’s overcoming in his own words:

“I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?… All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood, and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is ape to man? A laughingstock or painful embarrassment. And man shall be that to overman: a laughingstock or painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape… The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth… Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss … what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.”

As we tinker with the entire biosphere, this has all become very practical…

Don’t underestimate poetical metaphysics: had the Germans read and understood Nietzsche, there would not have been the savage Prussian inspired racist, fascist and demented assaults German plutocracy unleashed in 1914 and 1939 (yes, I know, Great Britain financed Prussian racism and furious militarism as early as 1757).

Nietzsche was certain that the Germans would cause massive wars in the Twentieth Century, he wrote this explicitly, and he was, unfortunately 100% right (thus showing that the German catastrophe was predictable, thus avoidable; Nietzsche’s critique was similar to Einstein’s). History would have been different, if Germans had condescended to understand in 1912 what their descendants understand now. And even then, what they understand now is not history in full, which is even more dreadful and humiliating (in particular the stealthy, but decisive, role of US plutocracy, scrupulously ignored by the powers that be, as they were put in place by that very process they condemn with the tips of their forked tongues!)

2 Responses to “TRANSCENDENCE Is The NATURE Of HOMO”

I feel more transcendental already. I guess you like the transhumanist crowd of Silicon Valley. How does all this connect with Lamarck exactly? Lamarck used to be the third rail of science: touch it, and you got zapped for unscientific behavior! Did Nietzsche read Lamarck?

I don’t know if Nietzsche read Lamarck. But the passage I quoted is Lamarckian. My point was that transhumanism is humanism, as humanism has always overcome yesterday’s ways. Silicon Valley is not first

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